How bad are Crossfire problems?

[silverxgames]

I recently purchased an ATI Radeon HD 5970 for quite a good deal on Newegg. My question is: Only recently have I really researched Crossfire, and it seems to have plenty of issues. Is this true? Does everyone really need to wait weeks to play games like Skyrim because of driver issues?

Did I make a bad purchase? It's arriving tomorrow so there's no way to get a refund now.

 

[Ninja Pants]

Unfortunately AMD are still lagging behind in driver updates. Yes you may have to wait until they get their act together and release new drivers or at least a new CAP. However this is only on a minority of games and is generally released within a week or so.

In terms of Skyrim that is just a terrible console port form a developer who believes QA is a waste of resources. No mater what your build it almost seems like luck as to whether it will run smoothly or not. That is a bad example, a better example would be Saints Row: The Third which had horrible stuttering on CF set-ups but this was fixed within a few days, that is more representative of CF issues and AMD simply lagging behind.

Hope that helps, essentially just be aware that these issues exist and AMD is often slower than Nvidia to get their drivers in order so you may have to wait before new games run as expected.

 

[silverxgames]

Oh, ok, thanks. This was exactly what I needed.

 

[Onlyusemeisaac]

I run crossfire 5770's on Skyrim and it runs perfectly. At first I had a few problems, after disabling the second card, re-enabling it and a couple restarts it worked fine though. Weird.

 

[tjcoops]

I couldn't stress how bad my first experiences were with my 6850s in crossfire, but after diagnosing my power supply as the culprit I can honestly say that my crossfire experience is brilliant! Scaling is amazing and I don't suffer from stutter which is apparently notorious with my cards. Most games that aren't supported still work fine and show improvements, I only have two games that dont work well with crossfire and that's crysis 2 and F1 2011, not too sure why. As stated by ninja pants AMD may take a few days to update their drivers for a game but on the whole I've been very impressed by the frequency of CAPs (Crossfire Application Profiles) that AMD churn out that fix problems with certain games.

 

[HugoStiglitz]

Crossfire isnt as bad as some people make it out to be.

yes you get the occasional game that dosnt scale well or requires either a Driver update or game patch but all in all its a great experience.

I went from CF X1950 Pro's to CF 3870's to my now CF 5870's. and will prob go to CF 7xxx's.

back in the day i also had twin Voodoo 2 12mb in SLI (yes 3d Fx was the poineer for the consumer market and nvidia bought them out a few years later)

 

[silverxgames]

Best answer selected by silverxgames.